Reminder: Eventually, They’ll Be Hard to Wake UP

I wrote recently about how I was trying out having my two kids under two share a room. And it is still going well… during the night. The problem we’re having is in the early morning hours. For the last week, one or other of our kids has gotten up too early each morning. Too early meaning pre 6 a.m.

If it’s the older one who wakes first, this means sneaking up and working with him on the concept of his Gro Clock (a product I highly recommend), trying to convince him in whispers to wait for the “yellow sun” while he dramatically and loudly asks for a bottle and to get out of his crib (this is still way better than without the Gro Clock). By the time I’ve convinced him to lay back down, his infant brother has usually been sufficiently awakened that he then needs to be fed, so I have to get up anyway. A 3 month old is not unfortunately old enough to understand the concept of waiting for the “yellow sun” before he eats.

If it’s the three-month-old who wakes up first, I usually, after waiting through a few minutes of whimpering to see if he is going to put himself back to sleep for the last bit of the morning, try to sneak into the room and get him out of there without waking up his older brother. This hasn’t seemed to work either, as the older usually wakes up either at the sound of the door opening or at the sound of me picking up his brother. Repeat above steps re: the Gro Clock.

I could just give up, of course. I could decide that they’re too young to sleep in the same room, and that I may just have to sleep downstairs myself in order to give them their own rooms upstairs until they are five or six years old. But I’m not ready to give up on this dream, and one week of 5-5:30am wakings are not enough to scare off this Mom just yet!

But the point of this update is to share a reminder I got from a good friend about maintaining perspective. She wasn’t intending to give me this reminder, but she did. I was up feeding my younger son in the wee hours while the older one struggled upstairs with his wait for the yellow sun. I was grumbling in my head about how tired I was and wondering if I’d ever feel regularly well-rested again, when she sent me this photo she’d taken the night before when she was helping with the kids:

She shared it because it makes her laugh, and it made me laugh, too. It’s super goofy (and not just because of the medicine I gave him that stained his mouth and chest purple).

But more than that, it was a reminder that not so far away in the grand scheme of things, my kids won’t wake up early anymore. In fact, a day will come all too soon when they will probably be hard to wake up anytime before noon.

When that time comes, I won’t look back on these days and think about how tired I was, or remember the feeling of climbing out of my bed wearily yet again. I’ll look back fondly on this time with memories of faces like this. I’ll remember the silly way they gurgled and drooled all over themselves, or the way they threw their full (yet light) weight into my legs as they ran at me full speed for a hug. I’ll remember their goofy grins, wild giggles, and the seemingly endless train of “Mommy… watch… again!” as they displayed inordinate pride over small accomplishments.

And thinking of that, and looking at this picture, made my current predicament seem not so bad after all.